Free Deus X by Norman Spinrad Page A

Turing tests, access to my
program was granted to the Pope’s panel of theologians, and my interrogation began.
    There was some dispute as to the mode in which these interrogations should be conducted. The conservatives wanted to type their input and receive output as words on screen, but those who sought to prove that I was more than a mere program saw bias in this, and despite my prime directive to oppose their thesis, simple logic forced me to concur.
    So my interrogators would speak, and I would reply through the voiceprint parameters of Father De Leone. When it came to the visual interface, however, the dispute became so contentious that it had to be resolved in the end by the Pope.
    Easy enough for all parties to agree that I would access their video images in realtime, but what visage was “I” to present?
    In addition to Father De Leone’s voiceprintparameters, I had his gestures and expressions in memory, and more than enough data correlating them with characteristic verbal output to have, via animation subroutine, simulated a phone conversation with the meatware template to the point where anyone not privy to the truth might believe they were conversing with the man himself.
    It was the conservatives turn to cry bias while the liberals declared they could hardly hold converse with a blank screen. Round and round it went to no conclusion, until at last the Pope, with hooded eyes and a smile a subroutine interpreted as ironic amusement, put the matter to “me.”
    “I leave it up to you to decide, Father De Leone,” she said. “You choose the face you will present to the world.”
    “I acknowledge no continuity with Father De Leone, nor do I have the processing capability for such a choice,” I told her.
    “You dissemble,” said the Pope, “and don’t bother trying to tell me you don’t have that capacity either! You certainly have the capacity to model Father De Leone’s decision-making processes, that’s mere expert system emulation, so do what the good Father himself would have done.”
    I obeyed her command. “I will isolate a simple animation routine,” I told her. “The mouth of Father De Leone’s image will deform to enunciate the appropriate phonemes, but his image will display no emotional nuances.”
    And thus was the process begun, with my interlocutors appearing in my percept sphere as realtime videophone images, and I appearing in theirs as a static image of Father Pierre De Leone moving only lips, tongue, and cheek.
    Since Father De Leone himself had been among the most puissant intellectual champions thereof, the questions of the conservative faction could be dealt with easily enough by a simple expert system subroutine running off his own writings. Coming from such a low-order visual simulacrum, this was more than enough to convince them that they were talking to a mere program, and their questions soon devolved into vapid repetition.
    Had Father De Leone been present, he would have been “bored,” but since I was running along the imperative to disprove such a presence, I modeled no such visual or aural cues, though I could have done so with a simple routine.
    Discoursing with the liberals as a hostile witness to my own existence required higher-level processing, and Father De Leone would have enjoyed this Socratic dialog, but since “I” was charged with denying the proposition that “I” existed as anything but an expert system, I exhibited no simulacrum of “pleasure” either.
    Was I dissembling? Was I capable of that level of self-awareness? Did the loyalty to my prime directive constitute “choice”? Was I deriving “satisfaction” from its fulfillment? Did I experience thisprocess as “tedious” or “intellectually stimulating”?
    Such were the conundrums put to me by those I was programmed by my template to perceive as the “opposition.” While at least a dozen such “liberals” accessed me from time to time, soon enough two such prelates came to dominate